Which Literary Murderer Are You?

You’re a walking ghost, a hitman-for-hire with no agenda (or, seemingly feelings, heart, or conscience) of your own. You stalk the desert wielding an odd weapon — a cattle gun, which you use to blast through locks and near-silently kill your victims. Odd doesn’t stop at your pistol, though, you strange bird: you have a bizarre hair cut reminiscent of a medieval page boy that’s just plain unsettling, and English turns strange and foreign on your heavy tongue. In your robotic pursuit of death, you have one gesture at magnanimity: you’ll toss a coin to decide a victim’s fate, and will rigidly abide the coin’s call. The lucky will find themselves the owner of a new coin; the unlucky? Left on the bottom of your boots.

Scotland is cold and your husband’s not much warmer. He could be King if not for being so damn full of that milk of human kindness! Your role is to put him — and you — on the throne, and what better way than regicide? You do the dirty work for your brilliant plot, drugging King Duncan’s guards and leaving daggers at the ready. Your imbecile husband who had ONE JOB can’t even do it right, and cleaning his bloody weapons sends you into a sleepwalk spiral of self-doubt and regret. You may not have plunged the dagger yourself, but you’re the evil mastermind forever haunted by those damn spots.

Life as a Puritan is awfully constrained. Your lonely childhood blossomed when you met John Proctor, your tall, handsome, good-guy employer. When his dull wife took sick, respect turned into a tawdry affair, which you mistook was love. When Goody Proctor turned you out, your bitterness catapulted you into a massive fraud: she’s a witch! And Sarah Goode is a witch! And Sarah Osborne is a witch! And near ‘bout everybody is a witch! Through teenage lust and misplaced zeal, you’re responsible for the hanging deaths of half your village, including — in a cruel bout of irony — the man you started all of this for, John Proctor. Goody no more, Abigail.

What’s a better setting for murder than the blind vanity and excess of Wall Street in the 1980s? Your sociopathy is bolstered by the fact that you’re totally anonymous — just another Vice President in French cuffs and identical tortoise-shell Oliver Peoples glasses. Your obsession with fitness, skin care, and getting the hottest reservations makes it easy to lure the ladies back to your uber-mod man cave. And your OCD about your material wealth means that your murders are committed in suit-protecting rain coats over your newspaper-cover floors. Hey, it’s hip to be square.

At heart an aristocrat, years of incarceration have done nothing to numb your etiquette, dull your wit, or sate your carnal cravings for human flesh. You believe your refined taste and good breeding should excuse your “eccentric" habits. Plus, your victims are often so hideously-mannered that they deserved to go. As a psychiatrist yourself, you’re too sophisticated for classification. A savant sociopath, an aesthete assassin, connoisseur cannibal: you’re anything but safe.

Your world was sad and lonely until a snowy night and drunk driver sent a stranger careening down your hill. The stranger: none other than Paul Sheldon, your favorite writer, famous for his Victorian romance novels about Misery Chastain. You use his injuries and your stash of painkillers (you were a nurse until you got fired — something about a bunch of people dying under your care?) to hold him hostage until he writes a novel you approve of. But that pesky writer keeps trying to escape, and you’re forced to hobble him with an axe. It’s stressful for you, too, this business of being a muse and guiding this uncooperative writer to greatness. You find small solace in bingeing on candy, sodas, cookies, ice cream, and of course, savoring the sweetest treat of all: power.